


milk teeth

by hellodeer



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Gen, Haircuts, Pre-Canon, Teen Victor Nikiforov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 12:09:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14748587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellodeer/pseuds/hellodeer
Summary: Viktor, seventeen and home alone, cuts his own hair.





	milk teeth

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was written for kamome: a soft viktor zine. it was my first zine ever, and i couldn't be more grateful that it was all about my main man vik. i really enjoyed working with all the amazing people on this zine, especially karen, who made amazing art for this fic!! here's her beautiful drawing on [twitter](https://twitter.com/cawwmics/status/1000068955443118080) and [tumblr](http://okaykarendraw.tumblr.com/post/174261513471/here-is-my-piece-in-collaboration-with)! :)

The TV buzzes with sports commentary in the living room and Makkachin barks, but the loudest sound in the house comes from the bathroom, where Viktor stands in front of the sink, looking at himself in the mirror. He grabs a fistful of hair, positions the blunt scissors around it, shoulder level, and _snip_. Then he does it again, and again, and again, until there’s nothing left to cut.

Viktor looks down. Long locks of silvery hair pool around his feet. Makkachin sniffs at them and tries to lick Viktor’s sore ankles and new calluses, but Viktor shoos him off, his feet smelly and disgusting from practice still.

He lifts his eyes to stare at his reflection. His hair doesn’t reach below his neck now. The tips are dry and starting to curl a little. Tentatively, he grabs a comb on the sink and parts it down the middle.

“Look, Makkachin,” he says quietly, now combing it to the left. A mixture of fear and excitement cocoons itself inside his chest, the same sensation he feels after showing the audience a new program. “Just wait until Yakov sees this. Wait until everyone sees this!”

He combs it to the right, winks at his reflection. Makkachin barks.

Viktor tries to hold his hair in a ponytail, but the underside is not long enough and a lot of strands keep falling from his hand, so he changes it to a tiny ponytail on the top of his head. Then he goes for a bun and fails. He frowns, clicking his tongue in frustration.

“Do you think they’re going to take me seriously now?” he asks Makkachin, as he combs all his hair back. But then he’s faced with the sight of his huge forehead, so he brings it all forward, to the front of his face. “What about now?” he giggles, seventeen and home alone, eager to drink in people’s reactions when he shows up with a brand new haircut at the World Championships next month.

He shakes his head to get the hair out of his face, but a stubborn lock insists on falling on his nose. He goes cross-eyed to look at it. He puffs and puffs, and the lock goes up and down, up and down.

Georgi’s mom owns a hair salon. For the past seven years, he has told Viktor the excruciating details of post-haircut care every time he’s gotten one, while Viktor smiled politely and nodded in all the right places.

So he takes the shampoo and conditioner out of the shower and places them on the sink. They’re an American brand that Viktor has never seen in Russia. He had asked Yakov to bring them from Skate America last November, because he’d been assigned to the Rostelecom Cup and NHK Trophy and wouldn’t be going further West anytime soon. Yakov had frowned deeply with a Soviet-born distrust of anything American, but bought them anyway. But the bottles are almost empty now; he’ll have to buy more in Canada.

He opens the faucet to cold water. The February air is chilly, even with the heater on, but Viktor’s used to ice rinks colder than this, to forgetting his gloves and ending practice with blue, numb fingers, to silence from the audience that chills him to the bone. He sticks his head under the spray and uses his fingers to get his hair evenly wet. 

Viktor hums along to the Olympic song coming from the TV while he shampoos his hair carefully, rubbing it against his scalp. Makkachin lies on the floor, head on his front paws, watching. Viktor closes his eyes and sees himself on the ice, skating a perfect short program, nailing the triple axel that’s been giving him trouble the entire season. He pictures himself winning Worlds, standing on top of the podium with heavy gold around his neck.

He rinses, then applies the conditioner. The liquid is smooth and sticky, just like the oil the president of the Russian Skating Federation had on his hands last December, which stuck to Viktor’s hand for hours after the man shook it before giving him the bronze medal at Nationals.

“Pretty skating like yours won’t make the Olympic team,” the man had said later, which had made Yakov frown and Viktor smile sunnily. The president had been right: Viktor didn’t make the Olympic team, lacking the experience and support the other two had, but not the talent, not the hard work — he went on to win Europeans and made sure to thank those who didn’t believe in him on national television.

He giggles as he raises his head. But looking at himself in the mirror, hair dripping water and conditioner on the floor, the smile is replaced by a frown. For long seconds, the new hair sits deeply wrong with him. He looks at the long, long locks still around his feet, and a wave of sadness and regret crashes over him.

Then Makkachin barks, and Viktor blinks.

“Right,” he sniffs. His eyes are red and wet, so he splashes water on his face before washing the product off. He closes the faucet and wrings the water from his hair as best as he can, then uses the towel around his shoulder to dry it softly. 

He grabs the serum on the sink and applies it from root to tip, using his fingers as a comb. He’d thought about cutting his hair after hearing from Yakov he wouldn’t be going to Torino, in a fit of melancholy and anger, like he’d read somewhere that people do after a breakup. But he hadn’t, because he’d thought his hair was his trademark, Celestino Cialdini-inspired, maybe the only attribute that made him stand out among the cluster of young, up-and-coming skaters, but now, now—

Now he’s on the verge of eighteen, and when he was a junior there were pieces about him on teen magazines, but now there’s a torn-up article in the kitchen trash, on a sports magazine that calls Viktor a _boy_ , a flopping _child_ , and misspells his last name. It also calls him _Prince of the Ice_ , which is just wrong when what he wants is the throne.

“Makkachin, get me the brush, please,” he says, pointing to where the brush sits inside the tub. Makkachin goes for it, tail swooshing from side to side, then brings it to Viktor. “Thank you, my lovely assistant.”

Brush it one hundred times, his mother taught him. She used to do it for him when he was little; sometimes his dad did it, sometimes both. He wishes they were here to do it for him now, when he’s feeling weird and a little sad, but he’ll have to wait until they get back from dinner at his aunt’s.

When he’s done, he plugs in the hair dryer. His free program music is _Danse Macabre_ , but he runs through the steps Lilia choreographed for him while the figure skating announcers yap on the TV until he gets tangled in the too-long cord. He turns off the hair dryer and looks at the finished product of his reflection.

He vaguely remembers having had hair this length once, when he first decided to grow it out. But it had been _so long ago_. He feels wrong and suddenly very tired, graceless and powerless like Samson, except in this scenario he’s Delilah, too. He lets a few tears fall. Makkachin comes to whimper at him, putting his paws on Viktor’s thighs. He scratches behind the dog’s ears and smiles wetly down at him.

Viktor cranes his neck to look at the clock on the wall in the living room. It’s two in the morning, way past his bedtime, almost time for the ceremony. He’d promised himself some popcorn earlier, so he pads to the kitchen to make it, Makkachin following behind. While it pops, he looks at himself on the shiny surface of the microwave. His reflection blinks back at him, new hair soft and short, bangs falling on his left eye. He looks different, almost a stranger, but the more he looks at it, the less weird it seems. He doesn’t look as pretty as before, but he does look handsome. Not so much like a child anymore; more like a man.

He smiles.

When he sits on the couch, dog on one side and popcorn bowl on the other, the men’s victory ceremony is about to begin. That’s when his parents arrive, hurriedly closing the door on the wave of cold wind that knocks uninvited.

“Are you still up, Vitya?” his mother says, then stops in her tracks when he looks at them over the back of the couch.

“Surprise?” he half-jokes, half-asks, smiling with a bit of trepidation.

“Who are you?” his dad frowns, but Viktor can see he’s trying to fight a grin.

“You look just like my son,” his mom says. She comes closer and cups his face in both of her hands. “But even more good-looking.”

Viktor’s chest grows warm with love. He beams at his mom, all of his teeth and gum showing, and she smiles right back.

“Viktor!” his dad yells. Viktor looks over his mom’s shoulder to see his dad shaking a broom at him. “I’ll have to sweep all that hair!”

Giggling, Viktor turns back to the TV just in time to see the Russian Olympic champion step on the podium. He might not have made the team this time, but he knows, with bone-deep certainty, the same way he knows the sun rises every day and gold comes from the bowels of the Earth to feel best around his neck, that it’ll happen in four years. 

He hugs Makkachin, bubbly-happy and excited for what’s to come.


End file.
